The present invention relates to a data processing apparatus for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus, and in particular, to a data processing apparatus for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus suitable for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus to conduct micromachining.
FIG. 12 shows a configuration of a data processing apparatus for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus in the prior art. The configuration of FIG. 12 includes an etching system 1 of the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus, etching chambers 11 and 12 as processing chambers of the etching system 1, and sensors 13 and 14 respectively of the etching chambers 11 and 12. Each of the sensors 13 and 14 measures various physical quantities, for example, a degree of vacuum in a vacuum chamber, plasma density, and an output from a plasma emission spectrometer to produce sensor data. The configuration further includes a controller 15 of the etching system 1 to obtain wafer processing information items such as a type of a wafer being processed and a processing condition for the wafer. Reference numeral 2 indicates a data collector. Reference numeral 21 indicates a data processor of the data collector 2. The data processor 21 collects the sensor data and the wafer processing information to store them in a database 22. Reference numeral 3 indicates a data analyzer which accesses the database (DB) 22 via the data processor 21 to acquire necessary data and analyzes the data. The operator of the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus can operate the semiconductor manufacturing apparatus according to results of the analysis.
FIG. 13 shows a sequence of processing executed by the data processor 21. As can be seen from FIG. 13, when the etching system 1 includes a plurality of etching chambers 11 and 12, the data processor 21 obtains, for example, alternately sensor data from the sensors 13 and 14 of the respective chambers 11 and 12 to store the data in the database 22.
Since the sensor data includes, for example, information with respect to time of a plasma emission spectrum (several thousand of data items per second) from the plasma emission spectrometer described above, a large amount of information items must be processed. Therefore, the data analyzer 3 takes a long period of time to obtain sensor data from the data collector 2 and imposes at the same time a load onto the data collector 2. This hinders the data collecting operation of the data collector 2. Particularly, when the etching system includes a plurality of etching chambers as shown in FIG. 12, the data collector must alternately handle the data items from the sensors in a duplicated manner as shown in FIG. 13. Therefore, it is difficult to guarantee a free period of time to be allocated for the data analyzer 3 to execute data processing, for example, a data extraction request. That is, in the data processing apparatus of the prior art, it is difficult to guarantee a wait period of time to execute processing such as analysis, and hence usability of the apparatus is deteriorated.
It is therefore an object of the present invention, which has been devised to remove the problem, to provide a data processing apparatus for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus with high usability in which the wait time required for the processing is reduced.
To solve the problem, there is provided according to the present invention a data processing apparatus for a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus comprising a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus for executing processing for a wafer, a data collecting semiconductor device for collecting processing data generated in association with the processing, and a data copying semiconductor device for extracting the processing data collected in said data collecting semiconductor device and for producing a copy of the processing data. Moreover, the data processing apparatus may comprise data analyzing means for analyzing the data copy produced by said data copying semiconductor device and for diagnosing a processing state of said processing apparatus.
Other objects, features and advantages of the invention will become apparent from the following description of the embodiments of the invention taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.